John Akomfrah
24 June – 12 August 2016

Lisson Gallery New York presents the first major exhibition in the
United States by acclaimed British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah. Akomfrah
first came to attention in the 1980s as a founding member of the influential
Black Audio Film Collective alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul,
with whom he still collaborates today. Known for his use of archival film
footage, still photography and newsreel combined with new material, Akomfrah’s works
are informed by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality
and aesthetics and often explore the experience of the African diaspora in
Europe and the United States. He recently garnered international acclaim at the
2015 Venice Biennale for his three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea, which uses the sea as a vehicle
to comment on the cruelty of the whaling industry and the diasporic condition.

For
his American debut, Akomfrah will present two film installations, first shown
at Lisson Gallery London in January 2016, rich with historical reference and
contemporary resonance. Characterised by beautifully composed imagery and
immersive sound design, these recent films uniquely employ original footage
rather than archival imagery. The Airport,
a three-screen film installation conceived as a meditation on Greek history and
its recent financial crisis, set around the landscapes of Southern Greece and
an abandoned airfield near Athens, recalls the work of two filmmaking greats: Stanley
Kubrick (1928-1999) and Theo Angelopolous (1935-2012). Accompanied by a new
soundtrack composed by Akomfrah, the film’s elliptical narrative weaves
together cinematic, literary, philosophical and artistic traditions, where
spaces of human ruin and natural beauty abound. Populated by displaced and anachronistic
characters, including an elderly man in a tuxedo who re-lives moments from his
past and his future, a wandering astronaut, marauding gorilla and forlorn
travellers, the film contemplates the significance of empire and the ghosts which
linger in our collective consciousness – both physically through architecture and
metaphorically through traces of previous generations. The film’s elastic sense
of time references Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968), while Angelopolous’ technique of employing constant
movement between camera, characters and locations is also employed to a poetic
effect.

The
second work, Auto Da Fé (2016) or Acts
Of Faith,is a diptych that looks at
migration through the lens of religious persecution and continues Akomfrah’s longstanding
interest in the transmutations brought about by relocation. Presented as a
lyrical period drama, the film lays bare colonial and post-colonial experience
through its documentation of eight historical migrations over the last 400
years, starting with the little known 1654 fleeing of Sephardic Jews from
Catholic Brazil to Barbados and ending with present day migrations from
Hombori, Mali and Mosul, Iraq. As the film develops, viewers are presented with
multiple tales of displaced populations and attendant feelings of dislocation
and alienation. The work is inspired by the writings of George Lamming, who
wrote about the quotidian nature of 20th century life in Barbados
and migrants’ hopes for a better future, only to find harsher conditions when
arriving elsewhere. The work was filmed on location in Barbados,
but the landscape is deliberately anonymous, reflecting the universal nature of
these stories.